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by SpicyLemonZest 655 days ago
The reason we don't have it in the US is that many cities tried and failed to make it work in the 50s and 60s, to the point that we have a slang term "projects" memorializing the failure. Public housing can't be desirable unless it's safe, and it's not clear whether anyone knows how to run a crime-free public housing project in the US.
1 comments
mullingitover 655 days ago
If you fail a test and the rest of the class doesn't, it implies that you were just unprepared for the problems the test is not in fact impossible.

Just because the US made some poor decisions (e.g obviously cramming 100% poor people into vertical concentration camps doesn't work, you need to have mixed incomes to have a healthy community) in its rollout of public housing many decades ago doesn't mean it's an unworkable idea. Singapore and Vienna are two examples demonstrating this point.

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SpicyLemonZest 655 days ago
Sure! But the fact that it's possible in principle doesn't automatically prove that you should trust your local city planners when they say they're totally gonna get it right this time.

It's not like public housing has gone completely extinct in the US. Chicago is working on a couple of mixed-income projects, and if they succeed at creating safe units where people who have a choice might like to live, presumably that will boost the popularity of public housing. But given the historical track record, I'm not holding my breath.

Part of the problem, I should note, is that the "100% poor people" thing is very much a live issue. Many American advocates of public housing continue to argue that housing developments _should_ contain 100% poor people, arguing that mixed-income developments are gentrification and/or a handout to developers. In San Francisco, for example, both locals and government officials routinely insist (https://missionlocal.org/2022/06/plaza-east-residents-demand...) that mixed-income projects don't make sense because the market rate units could instead be given to a poor person.

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mullingitover 654 days ago
> In San Francisco, for example

Haha, yeah let's exclude SF from any cities we're going to use as examples of good planners, unless we're talking about "How to slowly convert a city into a giant museum." 99% of the city's purist concern trolling is purely to prevent development, not about doing it equitably. Indeed, any city that's setting unrealistic development goals in the name of equity is likely doing it as an excuse to block development/solicit bribes/transfer wealth to existing property owners.

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